Two incompatibilities with Word 2010

[Philip Goddard]

I'm trying out Atlantis, which I discovered today through an online search for Word alternatives, very much wanting to get clear of the bloat of M$ Office (of which only Word is of use to me anyway), and I'm greatly impressed with Atlantis, despite a few detail issues that I'll raise elsewhere. However, I've found two incompatibilities between Atlantis and Word 2010 that I must get resolved if I'm to make the break and get using Atlantis 'for real'.

I've been playing about with a test file (a copy of one of my walks & hikes journal files), which contains particular symbol characters at certain positions in each day's entry, and initially each entry was followed by a horizontal line.

Now, when that was loaded into Atlantis, all looked fine, apart from all the horizontal lines having vanished.

I then tried inserting a few horizontal lines in the file in Atlantis (the facility for inserting them was a cow to find - there needs to be a toolbar icon for this), then saving the file and loading it in Word. Word did show those lines, but NOT its own lines, which clearly Atlantis had completely stripped out! Not good! Please, is there a way to get Atlantis to preserve and display (and of course correctly save) horizontal line and other graphics in imported Word documents? This is important, as I must have proper file compatibility between Atlantis and Word, and at the moment I do not have this.

Also, I found that, in the file saved from Atlantis and then reloaded into Word, just here and there any of the symbol characters were replaced by what looked like ###, but actually was a field that was something to do with inserting special characters - weird! All the more weird was that this substitution looked to be occurring just occasionally and randomly through the file, most of each of the different symbol characters being untouched. And then, weird yet again, is that when I saved that file from Word and reloaded it into Atlantis, ALL the symbol characters were displaying perfectly. Yet, when I then saved that file and re-loaded it into Word, again there were those peculiar '###' field substitutions, and in the same positions!

Again, I must have this issue resolved if I am to use Atlantis 'for real'. I really do hope that both these issues can be easily be resolved, for I do really want to make a break from Word and all its bloat, and apart from those incompatibilities, Atlantis currently looks to be the best contender as my Word replacement. -- Thank you.

[Philip Goddard]

Oh dear - I see that Atlantis is not for me, despite its many great features! I've worked out why those horizontal lines get stripped out of Word documents: it's clear that Atlantis doesn't support vector graphics, which Word uses for its horizontal lines and indeed shapes and charts and probably other things. Also I now find that Atlantis doesn't even support tables, and the developers have had a long-standing resistance against implementing them, so I can't expect such support to appear in the near future.

So, sadly, Atlantis is 'out' for me. In my view it is wrong to state that Atlantis supports the Word .doc format without making it clear that that support is only partial, and that certain basic Word functionalities, which most people would expect and require in a reasonably advanced wordprocessor, are not available in Atlantis - and thus there can be no free exchange of any but the most basic .doc files between Word and Atlantis.

[admin]

Atlantis Word Processor does not have all the features of MS Word (actually no other word processing application has all the features of MS Word). Yes, there are formatting types unsupported by the present version of Atlantis. But even different versions of MS Word have plenty of incompatibilities.